Can’t really expect anything else from a person that’s on a pro-tankie instance. Almost every time someone starts this both sides nonsense, it’s lemygrad, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.

tbh my take is alot of people would like an option between paying $2 for a garment they know involved exploitation/slavery vs an accessible1 independent option that doesn’t cost $500/garment.

I would have wanted to believe that too, but then you see things like Temu that promise clothing and consumer goods at impossibly low prices, prices that simply aren’t possibly without forced labor somewhere, and people eat that shit up. I think that most people have an out of sight, out of mind approach to it, and as long as they can’t directly see the exploitation, they’ll accept it.

1 Quick note on accessibility, there are ofc some scant options between $2-500, but what isn’t clear (ie. readily accessible) to the consumer is which of those options isn’t just some greedy bastard buying a $2 option and selling it on for $15.

I strongly suspect that this obscurity is by intent.

And, taking this whole thing a bit farther, as a designer that was paying myself $20/hr, I still can’t guarantee anything about being free of forced labor, because I have no way of realistically tracking everything in my supply chain. This is why there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the best you can do is pick your battles.

Look, no one decides that they want to work in the mines because it’s good for society as a whole to have consumer goods made from what they mine. Everyone expects to be paid in some way.

If I’m making jeans as an independent designer–which I tried doing, briefly–and I decide that my time is worth $20/hr, then I’m going to have to charge around $500 for a single pair of jeans after you figure in all the time needed to make a single pair that’s been customized to fit a single, specific person. (Maybe more; I haven’t done the math in a decade or so.) Almost no one is going to want to, or be able to afford to pay that. Am I skimming off the top? No, I’m charging a fair–and actually very low–rate for custom work. But just like when I tried to do that a decade ago, no one can or will pay for that.

Even if we capped profits of investors, and capped salaries of executives, and had most of the profits going to the workers, people would tend to prefer less expensive goods over more expensive goods. That’s how competition in the market works. In a sufficiently competitive environment, without legal constraints, prices have to drop. (Monopolies raise prices by reducing competition; a sufficiently competitive environment assumes that there is no single company dominating the market.)

Just because something is expensive doesn’t always mean that the standard of living of those making the product is any better.

Oh, absolutely. But when mills, etc. are in the US, there’s more direct control over the living conditions of the workers.

make everyone feel guilty all the time,

Then people just tune it all out, and learn to accept the inherent violence of the system. Sadly.

It is in part a consumer issue. Consumers want things as cheaply as possible, and companies that produce as cheaply as possible sell more product. We’ve seen the same issue with apparel; America wants cheap clothing, and so the mills in the US have largely closed, and most production has been moved overseas in order to make the final products cheap enough.

And while it’s partly a consumer issue, the fact that wages haven’t kept up with productivity–that is, more and more money is being skimmed out of the system by investors and executives rather than going to the workers–has been the driver towards making consumer goods more and more cheaply, simply because people have less purchasing power.

<serious> Frozen blueberries are about $15/4#, and don’t go bad unless you forget them for several years and they get hideously freezer burned. Yeah, they’re as good as fresh if you’re just eating plain blueberries, but if you’re making something that uses blueberries as an ingredient, they work wonderfully.

…No?

You aren’t paying for the merit badge per se, you’re paying for the physical manifestation of it. You have to do the work and meet the goals in order to get the merit badge. Once you’ve earned the merit badge, there’s no need to pay for the embroidered patch if you don’t want to. It’s not going to affect whether or not you are able to get your Eagle.

Wait wait wait, does that mean that being gay is the ultimate straight behaviour? Like, it’s gay to like women, because only a man knows what a man wants? ;)

A lot of 2nd wave feminism does sound weird now, yeah. But at the time–this would have been the 50s-70s or so–it was a novel way of viewing power dynamics and what consent meant.

And I think you would have found that person doing the sexualizing was well past their 30s

…What are you even talking about?

Okay, let’s put it this way.

Let’s say you’re a woman, and you’ve been pulled over by a male cop. He’s got you dead to rights on possession of cocaine with intent to distribute after spotting the bales of cocaine in your back seat. He’s willing to just give you a ticket for a burned out tail light, but only if he can fuck you, right then and there. Can you, in that moment, morally and ethically consent to sex with him, when he has the legal authority to arrest you and ensure that your life is fucked forever if you do not consent? Most people would say no, that entire environment is coercive, so there’s no way that, within that framework I’ve presented, that the woman could morally or ethically consent to sex in order to make her ‘little problem’ go away.

2nd wave feminism presented all male-female relationships in that way, although usually with a less blatant abuse of power going on. If you assume that patriarchy stacks the power deck in favor of men, then there’s very little basis for women to ever consent to sex with a man, because she is never able to have an equal position of power within society from which to consent. But that’s also a problem, because it abstracts people to the point where it’s almost meaningless on an individual level.

Here’s the basic line of thought:

Men occupy a more powerful position in society due to the generally patriarchal structures. Women occupy a less powerful position than men, even when a particular women holds more overt power (e.g., a woman that’s a CEO). As a result, sexual relationships between men and women always have a power imbalance; that imbalance of power means that women can never really be consenting, since there’s always some form of ‘threat’ involved. A woman that believes she wants sex believes that way because society has conditioned her to be that way, rather than that being something she chose in a vacuum.

And theoretically, this is all true, kind of. But it also isn’t, because that would mean that women can never have any agency over their own body or their own sexual choices. …Unless they “choose” to be lesbian, which isn’t actually a choice at all.

That’s… Genuinely complicated.

Kids aren’t asexual, and then BOOM they’re sexual the second they hit 18. I was very interested in sex from an age that would make most people deeply uncomfortable to think about. Romeo and Juliet laws exist because we recognize that first, kids are going to be sexual, and second, it’s not always going to be with peers that are exactly their own age, and that prosecuting minors for statutory rape–since neither party could legally consent–is a little crazy.

So there needs to be some kind of line between recognizing that kids are sexual, and adults not treating them in a sexual way.

Typical “both sides” bullshit.

Inkjet definitely has a place; it’s for high-resolution and accuracy printing, esp. photography. Consumer-level inkjet printers are mostly a waste of money. A correctly calibrated ink jet printer will print color more accurately–within it’s gamut capability–and be higher resolution than laser printers. I’ve really liked Epson large format printers in the past, but I’m not sure who currently does the best large photo printers.

dismissing information based on mediabiasfactcheck

Dismissing information based on it coming from a badly biased source is smart. If the information is solid, then there will be other, credible sources that cover it, without the bias. The problem with taking information from a deeply biased source is that you have to try and fact check every single claim that they make in an article, because they’re inherently untrustworthy. If you want to waste your time tracking down sources to try and verify things, rather than just finding good sources to start, well, that’s a you problem.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner/

Bad source.

…You’re really saying that one party where you have no functional choice is better than a multi-party system, just because you think that Republicans and Dems are too alike, while ignoriing the plethora of other parties that not only actually exist in the US, but hold office at local and state level?

Shouldn’t expect any more from a tankie though.

And how many parties were they allowed to make selections from? Were there any candidates that weren’t pre-approved by the leading party?